Flanging machines of the kind referred to are known for applying irremovably covering strips against the corresponding peripheral edges of differently shaped panels made of wood, chip wood, plastic and similar materials, into which the panels to be coated along the edges are arranged, which panels are prepared and cut in advance with the pre-established shapes and sizes by means of machining steps performed with operative machines of conventional type, and such panels are progressively coated along their peripheral edges by corresponding covering strips made of wood, plastic or other suitable materials, in such a way that they are fixed against such edges without the possibility to disjoin therefrom.
In order to perform this, these covering strips are coated in advance with suitable adhesive materials such as for instance thermomeltable glues of conventional type onto the surface thereof to be fixed against said peripheral edges, which operation is normally performed in a particular operative station of the machine and consists in drawing by a roll the adhesive material contained into a proper reservoir and transferring such adhesive material onto the surface of the strips to be applied against the different peripheral edges of each panel, by means of contact of such roll against the surface referred to, and afterwards the strips so coated with adhesive material are pressed by an additional machine pressing roll against the peripheral edges of each panel, thereby providing a close irremovable junction therewith.
Such covering strips may be also pre-coated with adhesive materials on other areas of the processing factory, so that these strips so arranged in the flanging machines referred to are firstly heated at temperatures enough to soften the same adhesive materials, and thereafter fixed as described above against the peripheral edges of each panel.
However, the flanging machines of the kind described have evident applicative limits, ascribable above-all to the fact that they are able to perform satisfactory flanging operations of panels with rectilinear outlines only and not with curvilinear and mixed rectilinear-curvilinear outlines, as it would be desirable, since such machines are designed to machine only along Cartesian axes X and Y, which are rectilinear and orthogonal to each other, and therefore cannot perform machinings along bent lines, so that in presence of such profiled panels the flangings thereof cannot be performed automatically with such machines, and must be performed exclusively manually, with consequent drawbacks from the points of view of a lower flexibility and highest burdens in the manufacture of these kinds of panels.